That elegant old room, once so stark and spare, with light as its only ornament, was now filled with color and fragrance. Bob Rigsby had lined the back wall with pine boughs, just like at the grand old Rose Show of 1933, and in front of that greenery he had set up tiered shelves draped in white, each shelf lined with roses in green bottles. They were at the height of their last fall bloom—hybrid tea roses and grandifloras from the municipal flower beds, and from the heritage rose garden in the park blowsy damasks, sweet little China roses, and fragrant Noisettes.

Bob Rigsby let them all just sit for a minute to get their bearings and breathe in the fragrance of cool pine and warm rose. Then he began his last lesson.

“Every rose has a name.” He started on the top shelf, holding up each rose and naming it: “Mutabilis, La Reine Victoria, and Mrs. Dudley Cross. Some are named for people. This gold and coral rose Abraham Darby named for a nineteenth-century industrialist; this little sweetheart rose Cecil Brunner named for the daughter of a Swiss nurseryman; this old China rose Louis Philippe named for a French king.”

The beautiful colors came and went—the velvety red of a Mister Lincoln, the delicate shell pink of a Souvenir de St. Anns, and the rich gold of a Graham Thomas, as Bob Rigsby named presidents and princesses and distinguished horticulturalists and told their stories: Devoniensis, Céline Forestier, Duchess de Brabant. It was another mesmerizing Bob Rigsby art lesson, and soon nervous hands quit clutching, worried brows unclenched, and under the chairs the feet got still.

As Bob Rigsby came to the last of the roses, that magical reflected light began to gather. “This little pink rose is named La Marne,” he said, “and this rose—”

But instead of a rosebud in a green bottle, this time he held up his painting in the last glowing light, that lovely striped rose with its shadowed leaf and its tender bud. Bob Rigsby didn’t say a name. He just waited, looking right at Miss Lila Hardwick, the Rose Queen of ’33.

“This rose is named…,” he prompted, and right then, out of all that clutter of a lifetime of memory, she retrieved it. “The Monday rose!” she screeched.

Bob Rigsby sank down into a chair and mopped his face, worn-out with the exhaustion of effort and accomplishment.

“That is exactly right,” he said. “This rose of great antiquity, rarely seen in cultivation today, was known in the twelfth century as Rosamund’s rose and is now named Rosa Mundi—or in Lila Hardwick’s mother’s yard in the thirties where it grew out by the washhouse—the Monday rose.”